Version 1.3 of our Zenbe Lists iPhone app is in the App Store hopper.  Keep an eye out for it in the coming week or so.  There aren’t a lot of new features since we’ve been busy with other projects, but here’s what you can expect:

• Display done/total item counts
• Improve visibility of due items
• Move “Add” buttons to navigation bar
• Bug fixes to improve the robustness of data storage and synchronization.

As with previous versions, we recommend you sync your lists to our servers before upgrading to v1.3. (Requires creating a zenbe account but, hey, it’s free.)  It’s a good precaution to take in case there are any hiccups with the update process.

Finally, a final heads up for anyone who hasn’t upgraded their phone to OS2.1 yet.  v1.3 of Lists will work with OS2.0, but this is the last version that will.  Moving forward, we’ll be developing for OS2.1 (or 2.2, depending on how the scheduling works out).

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the new features we launched yesterday on the Zenbe Webmail service:

Use email avatars for a more social email experience

You can now pick pictures for your email contacts and see them right along with their email. When you open an email from a friend or colleague, rollover the silhouette next to their address and click the pencil icon to open the contact photo picker. You can select a photo from our collection, an image from the files you already have on Zenbe, or search non-copyrighted images on Flickr to select an avatar for your contact.

Once you select a photo for a contact, every email that you receive from that person will show the picture you selected.

Also, some of you may not have known that Zenbe supports Gravatars. The Gravatar service allows you to associate a picture with any of your email addresses. If you use Gravatar to associate a photo with any of the email addresses you use in Zenbe, then your friends using Zenbe will automatically see your Gravatar image when they open an email from you. If any of your contacts are already using Gravatar, you’ll see their Gravatar photos when you open their email.

Gravatar pictures are also shown in our blog comments and forums when you post there.

Keep track of your favorite contacts

We know that you email some of your contacts more than others so we now allow you to mark certain contacts as “Favorites”. In your address book, click the blue star next to a contact name to add them to your favorites. You can then use the pulldown menu in the address book to only show your favorite contacts.

Did you know that you can quickly compose an email or search for a contact in one click from your address book? Just hover over the name of any contact and click on the binocular icon to search or the envelope icon to compose a new email to that person.

IMAP

Zenbe now supports accessing your email via the IMAP protocol. IMAP allows you to view your messages from a desktop application like Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook. It also works with many cell phone models, including the iPhone. Any email you read or delete on your desktop or phone will also show up as read or deleted on the Zenbe website.

The current version of Zenbe IMAP allows you to read and delete messages from any of the email accounts you check in Zenbe, but only messages that are in your Inbox. It’s designed especially for people who are on-the-go and want to check to see if anything important came into their Inbox via a mobile device.

If you’re interested, check out our help on how to setup IMAP.

Notifications when we can’t check your other email accounts

Many of you use Zenbe to check your email from other email accounts like Gmail, Yahoo Plus!, .Mac, or the email address you received from cable providers like Comcast or Time Warner. Sometimes you may change your password on one of these accounts but forget to tell Zenbe about the change. Now when that happens we’ll tell you which account we had a problem checking and the cause of the problem when you log in.

If you haven’t set up Zenbe to check your other email accounts, it’s very easy to do. Check our help on how to setup almost any email account in Zenbe. We’ll do all the hard work of figuring out which server settings to use. We also encrypt your password so your data is safe with us.

Conversation View Preview

We’re working on a conversation view that shows you all the messages associated with a particular conversation in a single view, similar to what many Gmail users are accustomed to. Unlike Gmail, Zenbe allows you to toggle the conversation view on and off if you don’t like it.

Next week we’ll start inviting users to preview this great new feature. If you’d like to be included in the preview, sign up to test conversation view here.

Bug Fixes

We’ve fixed several bugs including some you told us about on our User Forums:

• Files View Tag Filtering
• Firefox 3 mailto: handler improvements
• Better support for international characters

Closing your account

We realize that Zenbe is not for everyone and now provide a form you can fill out to close your account. If you do cancel your account, please let us know a little bit about why so we can continue to make Zenbe a great free email product.

Learn more about Zenbe

If you’re new to Zenbe and want to learn more, make sure to check our our help and FAQ and set up an account on our User Forums to tell us what you think.